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Article snippet: MORE's health chief is struggling to show that the administration is serious about taking on drug companies after its proposals for lowering prices last week left big companies relieved and even spurred an uptick in their stock prices. Secretary of Health and Human Services Alex Azar insists that the companies are misreading the administration's plan and that it will bring down drug prices. Yet drug stocks rose after Trump’s plan did not include most of the immediate actions that the industry had feared. The proposal left out two big ideas that Trump previously supported when he was running for president: Medicare directly negotiating drug prices and allowing the importation of drugs from abroad. Azar is trying to show that Trump is not backing off from his campaign promises to take on the drug industry, even though the plan no longer includes those big ideas, which Azar says would not work anyway. Asked about critics who say the plan lets drug companies off the hook, Azar said on CNN: “They can't read and they can't listen and they're not understanding.” But many analysts view the plan as underwhelming. “There was little in the President’s speech or in the blueprint that took direct aim at industry, despite the president’s tough talk against pharmaceutical company pricing practices,” Rachel Sachs, a drug pricing policy expert at Washington University in St. Louis, wrote in Health Affairs. Ian Spatz, a former top lobbyist at Merck who now consults for the in... Link to the full article to read more